Hawaii Undergoes Near Death Experience, The Fallout

What happened in Hawaii over this weekend when an alert went out across the whole island state that a ballistic missile was incoming? This is a news blurb report, where we highlight multiple news sources, excerpting from their articles, to give you a sense of the raw facts, as well as the particular slants the news outlets are taking.

What really happened in Hawaii is a question that we will be considering over the next few days, and one we will probably be discussing in the iPonder segment of iSDaily Tuesday, tomorrow, January 16th. For now, here is a representation of the media’s coverage of the Hawaii False(?) alarm along with a couple of conspiracy theories now emeging.

Police dispatchers in Hawaii figured out within five minutes that an incoming ballistic missile alert Saturday was a false alarm, but 911 audio recordings show authorities continued to struggle with what to do to calm panicked residents seeking safe cover.

It took 38 minutes for a second alert confirming that there was no imminent attack to be sent. Recordings obtained by the Bay Area News Group show the confusion officers on the street and dispatchers confronted in the meantime.

“Somebody,” one officer said amid the haunting episode, “should get fired.”

According to the police audio, officers seemed to immediately question the legitimacy of an alert sent about 8:07 a.m. warning that a missile was headed to the island chain and that “THIS IS NOT A DRILL”. The public, however, did not.

One minute after the first message went out, one Honolulu police officer told the dispatch center that we was getting flagged down by people on the street asking where to find the nearest bomb shelter.

Officers then told dispatchers that media stations were broadcasting news of the incoming missiles

For the next four minutes, no word came down that the alert was false. Then, at about 8:12 a.m., came the report that it was a drill.

Below is footage posted by a few sources, including We The People Magazine, and recirculated by several news outlets that purportedly shows children being ushered into a storm drain for protection against the fake news missile:

The terrifying message issued Saturday to all cell phones declared, “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

The follow-up message explaining that there was actually no threat or danger came almost 40 minutes later. The panic-inducing error, explained Hawaii Governor David Ige, was simply a state emergency management employee accidentally pushing the wrong button during a routine drill conducted three times a day during shift changes.

“We did make the determination that it was a false alarm. The alarm was sent out in error, and we know that the procedure in a shift change had been followed, and a human error sent out the false alarm,” Ige told Hawaii News Now. “We then went through our process to correct that and send out a notification that the alert was in error.”

“Today is a day that most of us will never forget, a day that many in our community thought our worst nightmares might actually be happening, a day when many frantically tried to think about the things they would do if a ballistic missile launch would happen,” said Ige. “I know firsthand that what happened today was totally unacceptable and many in our community were deeply affected by this and I’m sorry for that pain and confusion anyone might have experienced. I’m too very angry and disappointed this happened.”

Some people are using this false warning as an opportunity to attack Trump, accusing him on one hand of being the reason for the scare in the first place, due to his rhetoric directed at North Korea, and on the other hand of simply being an absentee President:

Rising Dem star, Tulsi Gabbard, hints at another narrative emerging, the anit-North Korea one. In her case, she took a softer approach, saying the false alert heightens the urgency to resolve the North Korea problem through negotiations, but others are calling for war against North Korea to end the threat altogether.

Gabbard said she wants Trump to negotiate with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un personally.

“I’ve been calling on President Trump to directly negotiate with North Korea, to sit across the table from Kim Jong Un,” Gabbard said, adding that the talks should “happen without preconditions.”

She said forcing the precondition that North Korea relinquish its nuclear program would be unlikely and self-defeating, adding that the US must recognize Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons development is informed by decades of US attempts to overthrow foreign governments.

“They see it as the only deterrent against the US coming in an overthrowing their regime there,” Gabbard said.

Trump has dismissed attempts by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to deescalate the situation through direct talks, and last month the White House reined in Tillerson’s offer to start talks without preconditions. Trump has insulted Kim as “Rocket Man” on Twitter and in a speech before the United Nations, and he has threatened North Korea with “fire and fury.”

Kim has insulted Trump and threatened to attack the United States as his country continues to develop and test nuclear weapons and missile systems.

In the CNN report, you can see the narrative they are running with, that Trump’s unstable responses to North Korea are the underlying cause for the fear triggered by the false alert. I doubt very much that were this false alarm sent under Barack Obama’s “watch” that somehow the Hawaiians would feel any less afraid than they did during this terrible 9 to 38 minutes.

The theories around this false alert include: This is a Deep State attempt to further undermine Trump by calling into question his stability in handling a dangerous foreign policy issue like North Korea. They want to push the narrative that Trump must be gotten rid of or else we will face nuclear annihilation.

There was an actual missile attack that was averted and the government does not want you to know how close people came to actually being killed by a nuclear strike.

This was an experiment to determine how people would react during a crisis that offered no hope of survival.

This is an ongoing experiment to see how a whole group of people might be affected by a shared mass near death experience.

One theory that is hardly being given any credence is the notion that, with the touch of a button, a low-entry worker would be able to send an automatic message to everyone in Hawaii that they were all, essentially, about to die thanks to a ballistic missile attack. That, my friends, is also a theory I’m not buying….at all.

We’re not done with the Hawaii question, as I stated in the beginning. This is only our preliminary look at this troubling event.

Paul Gordon is the publisher and editor of iState.TV. He has published and edited newspapers, poetry magazines and online weekly magazines.
He is the director of Social Cognito, an SEO/Web Marketing Company. You can reach Paul at pg@istate.tv